Yeah, that sums it up nicely.
You can look into tilt for local deployment and potentially into some kind of cron job that deletes obsolete namespaces.
One could also try Rancher Desktop - no need for the licenses there then.
It can be a buzzword, but also be convenient for various things.
But there certainly is a steeep learning curve
Thank you for your insight. And interesting project you got going on there.